War Wounds

Bombs fall and the lights go out.

When the bombing of Baghdad began, Karim, who has a small barbershop on a nameless side street near the city’s main bazaar, closed his business, but a few days into the second week of the war he reopened, and I asked the Ministry of Information for permission to visit him. (Restrictions on the activities of journalists had become so draconian by then that simply going to the barber without a minder looked suspicious.) Karim is a perfectionist. A shave and a trim can take forty minutes, which is very relaxing. He was finishing up with two clients—older men who had had their hair and mustaches dyed—when I arrived at the shop with Sabah, my driver. Iraqi men are very careful about their personal appearance. Mustaches are de rigueur, but other facial hair is shaved or plucked. One of Karim’s clients was standing near the door, letting the thick black paste in his mustache and hair dry; the other one, an Army officer, to judge from his uniform, was in the barber’s chair. He said, “Hello, hello”—an Anglicism that Iraqis employ as an all-purpose salutation. He was wearing a holster that held a gold-plated revolver. “Iraq just needs peace. Only peace,” he said in English when he got up. He said goodbye to us and left with his friend. Outside, people were looking up at the sky. You could hear the slow-rushing roar of a B-52 overhead. A few moments later, there were a couple of loud explosions, and the rattletrap building across the street shook. The plastic covering on its windows flapped violently. Karim paid no attention.

We had passed the Al Safeer Hotel, on Abu Nawas Street, where I used to stay, as we drove to Karim’s, and I noticed that a cinder-block wall had been put up where the hotel’s large ground-floor windows had been. The steel security shutters on pretty much all the businesses on Sadoun Street, which runs parallel to Abu Nawas, were locked tight, and windows were criss-crossed with adhesive tape. The Air Defense Ministry, a few blocks farther on, was flattened. Two great holes had been punched into it by cruise missiles in the first few days of the war, and now it was just a jumble of gray concrete slabs. A column or two and an archway still stood, leaning at odd angles. The great statue of Saddam, in front, was untouched.

It was difficult to get your bearings in the new landscape. Journalists weren’t permitted to visit recently bombed sites except in escorted groups—and not all the sites, even then—and every day our drivers and minders had to figure out ways to move around without letting us see what had happened during the previous night’s attacks. Two reporters, an Australian and a South African, who went on their own to inspect the damage to the Information Ministry after a second strike against it were expelled from the country. From then on, drivers stopped using the Sinak bridge to cross the Tigris, since the road leading from it runs past the ministry. Often, they would try to persuade us just to stay in the hotel. Lunch outings, which had once given the impression of freedom, were more or less impossible to arrange. Only two sit-down restaurants in Baghdad were still open for business, anyway, and, to avoid problems, Sabah usually got takeout meals from one or the other.

Sabah stayed in whatever hotel I was staying in, booking a room at discounted Iraqi-only rates. One of his sons would come by every day to say how the family was doing, and his wife, whom he calls “Madam Sabah,” sent us freshly made rice tortillas and thermoses full of Turkish coffee. Every two or three days, he went home for a visit. I urged him to go more often, but he said that there were too many people there and it was too noisy. It made him agitated. In addition to his wife and three youngest children, the children of his four brothers and their wives, and his elderly mother—all of whom lived in two adjoining houses—one of his sisters and her four children were staying with him. They lived near the Al Doura oil refinery, in a neighborhood where there had been a lot of bombing. Then some pieces of a missile landed in the street near the home of two of Sabah’s sons, who lived together a block away. One of the sons is married and has two young children. The next day, they moved in with the rest of the family. By my calculation, there were thirty-three people in two houses, with five bedrooms between them.

As the bombing went on, people developed minor health complaints—headaches and backaches. Most also suffered a loss of appetite. Cigarette smokers were smoking more than usual. An Information Ministry official named Walid appeared one day wearing a neck brace and wincing a lot. No one seemed to be getting much more than three or four hours of sleep a night. Sami, the government minder I share with another journalist, Paul McGeough, of the Sydney Morning Herald, is a diabetic, and one evening, when we were out chasing a reported bombing that involved dead civilians, he went into a state of shock and was temporarily incapable of speaking or understanding what anyone said to him. The next morning, I took Sami to a doctor, who said he could fall into a coma if it were to happen again. His insulin dosage needed to be checked, but his regular doctor had closed his clinic and left Baghdad for the duration of the war. Sami went to another doctor, who suggested he alter the dosage and get more sleep. He was feeling a little better the next day, he said to me, but he still couldn’t sleep. He shrugged. There was nothing he could do about it.

The warheads that crashed into the upper floors of the Information Ministry, which was also the headquarters of the foreign press center, made a mess of the satellite dishes and antennas on the roof, blew out most of the windows, and shredded much of the building’s interior. It was destruction that had been foretold. For several days, journalists had been warned by their organizations back home to stay away from the place because it was on the Pentagon’s target list. When a reporter asked the Information Minister, Muhammad Said Al Sahaf, how the ministry would continue to function, he replied, bluntly, “You are the ministry of information.” The next day, it was announced that the Palestine Hotel, where most journalists lived and worked, would officially become the press center.

Muhammad Said Al Sahaf is a short, corpulent man with large features and carefully cut hair that is dyed jet-black. After the war began, he started wearing a beret and a military uniform with a holstered revolver at his waist. He speaks English with a British accent and takes great delight in berating the Anglo-American forces as “mercenaries” and “war criminals,” gloating over battlefield victories claimed by the “heroic Iraqi resistance.” On March 30th, Sahaf informed us that Iraq’s government had issued a directive to its forces to bury “all killed American and British in the field, according to the laws of their religions. We cannot have their bodies lying around in the open or in refrigerators.”

After the Palestine was made the press center, we were told that we would be permitted to stay in the Sheraton, next door, which had previously been out of bounds. Paul McGeough and I took a spacious two-room suite on the twelfth floor of the Sheraton, a seventeen-story building constructed of brown concrete and tinted glass sometime in the eighties, with a central atrium and bulbous exposed glass elevators. The hotel lost its franchise and most of its customers long ago, but it has a certain charm. It is decorated in faux-Mesopotamian style, with pieces of old kilims in frames on the walls. The carpets and bedspreads have a vaguely Sumerian pattern, and the balconies, with their latticed wooden shutters, are modelled on the hanging balconies of old Baghdad. Our balcony has a sweeping view of the Tigris River, which runs immediately below it, and of the Republican Palace complex, with its parklands and bombed-out palaces. On the first night we were there, warplanes hit the complex at least three times and, within minutes, got another two targets in the city center, only six or seven blocks away from the hotel. We saw fireballs, and black smoke rising up into the sky. The Sheraton rocked back and forth, as if there had been a mild earthquake, and the windows buckled but didn’t break.

In the morning, I stood on the balcony and looked down at the river, which loops gradually to the southwest and is dotted here and there with islets of green bulrushes. Debris was strewn across the flat roof around the dome of the main Republican Palace. I could make out the Al Rashid Hotel, Saddam’s partially built mosques, the spindly, saucer-topped telecommunications tower, and the pyramid-shaped mansion that belonged to Saddam’s late brother-in-law Adnan, next to a military marching field spanned by an arch formed by giant sabres, each in the grip of a huge bronze hand and forearm. I counted thirteen oil fires pouring huge clouds of smoke into the city from different points south and west; there must have been at least that many behind me, on the other side of the building. As I watched, there was a roar, a terrific bang, and an explosion in the palace complex, perhaps half a mile in front of me. Flames shot up, followed by a huge column of smoke.

I heard a rattling sound and looked down. A man in a donkey cart carrying jerricans was clattering along Abu Nawas Street.

A group of tribal sheikhs and clan elders came through Baghdad to express their loyalty to Saddam Hussein. Dozens of them, dressed in traditional robes and wearing head scarves held down with black cords, came and went in minibuses and milled around outside the old Baghdad Hotel, which is eight or ten blocks from the Palestine and the Sheraton. It was said that the sheikhs were receiving money and weapons in return for rallying their people to fight against the Americans and the British. After several tries, I managed to talk to some of them. Salman Amoud Jumeil and Khalil Salah Al-Mushaqy, two men in their forties, told me they were from Diyala, a rural area near the border with Iran. Sheikh Jumeil said that he represented about a thousand people, mostly farmers. “It is a duty,” he said. “The duty of all the sheikhs is to defend their lands.” Jumeil added, with a little prompting, “We are here to support the leadership. We say no to the aggression against our country.”

I asked Jumeil whom he hoped to see in Baghdad. Would he meet with Saddam Hussein? He and Sheikh Mushaqy exchanged glances. “Maybe we will meet with someone important in the government to explain that we’re ready to fight,” Jumeil said. More sheikhs had wandered over to listen, and they formed a circle around us. One of them, a regal-looking dark-skinned man in a fine green robe and a white head scarf, interrupted. “We are here to renew our promise to fight for the government,” he said. And he added, “If the Americans come as guests, we welcome them. But if they come to occupy our country we will kill them. You have seen what is happening, because you are here living with us.” He motioned with his head, as if to indicate the bombed buildings, just out of sight, all over Baghdad. “No one has done anything to them, but the Americans have come here. Why?” He looked genuinely mystified.

An old sheikh who wore a brown manteau over a dish-dash robe with gold-embroidered edging asked me if I was from America. I said yes, and he repeated the question about America’s motives. The men craned to watch my face, and I said that, in my opinion, the September 11th attacks—all the sheikhs nodded when I said “September 11th,” not waiting for a translation—had transformed the security considerations of the United States, and it seemed that President Bush, and other Western leaders, had decided that Saddam Hussein’s regime was hostile, and that Iraq was a potentially dangerous state, and that for this reason Saddam had to go. The old sheikh demurred. “I think America comes just for the oil,” he said, “and to protect Israel.”

I asked Sheikh Mushaqy if he and the other sheikhs would be given weapons before they returned home, to help them in their fight. “We have weapons,” he replied. “We don’t expect to be given guns, but yes, directives on what to do.” He said that he thought the Americans would lose the war, because right was not on their side.

A bare-headed man in his twenties sidled up and began speaking forcefully. He said that his name was Mujabel Sahel Awad Al Halaj and that he was the son of one of the sheikhs, from the village of Al Hawijah, near Kirkuk. “The people of Al Hawijah support Saddam Hussein, and we are ready to defend great Iraq,” he said loudly. “Bush and Blair and Sharon are looking first after the safety of Israel, because our great leader Saddam Hussein always threatens Israel, and secondly they are looking for oil. We elected President Saddam Hussein and we love him and we are ready to do anything for him.”

When Al Halaj finished his speech, I asked him if there was fighting in Al Hawijah. He gestured dismissively. “Only the Kurds are threatening, but we don’t worry about them.” Al Halaj was eager to kill American and British soldiers. “If we catch any American soldiers, we will cut them”—he made a slicing motion—“and kill them like sheep.”

“You won’t take prisoners?”

“No,” Al Halaj shouted. He was getting worked up. “We’ll just cut them”—he made the slicing motion again—“and throw them to the dogs.”

Two rough-looking men in civilian clothes came up then and asked what we were doing. They didn’t seem friendly, and the sheikhs moved away. Sami told me that we should leave. At the hotel entrance, several sheikhs were getting into minibuses. They were on their way, I assumed, to an audience with someone in authority.

On the last day of March, I went to see Dr. Osama Saleh, an orthopedic surgeon and the head of medical services at the Al Kindi Hospital. In the nineteen-eighties, Dr. Saleh studied in Cuba, where he was a pupil of Cuba’s foremost orthopedist, Dr. Rodrigo Álvarez Cambras. I met Álvarez Cambras in Havana a few years ago, and he mentioned to me that he had treated Saddam Hussein and also his elder son, Uday, after Uday was gunned down and virtually paralyzed in an assassination attempt in 1996. Dr. Saleh and I spoke in Spanish for a while, and I said that I was interested in how the recent war casualties were being dealt with. Dr. Saleh is a tall, robust man of forty-eight with a receding hairline and a polite, professional manner. He led me down a long hall toward his office, puffing on a cigarette as we walked. There were many nurses and visitors in the hall, and women in black abaya robes squatted on the floor outside some of the rooms. Dr. Saleh stopped to talk briefly with three European doctors from Médecins Sans Frontières, the nongovernmental organization that had been in Iraq for several weeks, assisting Iraqi doctors.

One of Dr. Saleh’s assistants, a young woman, had pulled some images up on a computer screen in his office. Dr. Saleh invited me to look at them with him. The first image the assistant showed us was of a boy lying naked in the emergency operating theatre. A catheter and tube was attached to his penis. The child’s legs were smooth, but his entire torso was black, and his arms were horribly burned. At about the biceps, the flesh of both arms became charred, black grotesqueries. One of his hands was a twisted, melted claw. His other arm had apparently been burned off at the elbow, and two long bones were sticking out of it. It looked like something that might be found in a barbecue pit.

The child’s face was covered by an anesthesia mask. “This is Ali,” Dr. Saleh said. “He is twelve. He was wounded in a rocket attack the night before last in the southeastern part of Baghdad, about fifteen minutes from here. Ali lost his mother, his father, and his six brothers and sisters. Four homes were destroyed; in one of them, the whole family was killed, eight people.”

It was hard to imagine that the person in the photograph could be alive, but Dr. Saleh said that Ali was still conscious. “I don’t think he will survive, though,” he said in a flat tone. “These burned people have complications after three or four days; in the first week they usually get septicemia.” His assistant was pulling up new images on her monitor. They showed Ali again, on the same bed and in the same position as before, but this time without his charred appendages. Both arms had been amputated, and the stumps were wrapped in white bandages. His torso was covered in some kind of clear grease. The mask had been removed from his face, and he appeared to be sleeping. He had a beautiful head, with the feminine features of a prepubescent boy. In another picture, Ali was awake, staring at the camera with large, expressionless eyes.

Dr. Saleh’s assistant breathed in sharply and put one hand over her mouth. Then she brought up some images of Ali’s family just after the bodies had arrived at the hospital’s morgue. It was difficult to make out what had once been human beings. Cloth stuck to the bodies, bits of bold red-and-green fabric with flower designs. There seemed to be some straw mixed in, and I asked Dr. Saleh if they had been farming people. He said yes, and pointed out Ali’s mother. Her face had been cut in half, as if by a giant cleaver, and her mouth was yawning open. In other pictures, which Dr. Saleh said were of Ali’s father and a younger sister, all I could see was a macabre collection of charred body parts and some red flesh. The body of his brother was all there, it seemed, but from the nose up his head was gone, simply sheared off, like the head of a rubber doll. His mouth, like that of his mother, was open, as if he were screaming.

“Have you seen enough?” the assistant asked me quietly. I didn’t say anything, so she showed me more pictures. After a few minutes of this, Dr. Saleh said,“O.K. This is just part of the tragedy.” He asked me if I wanted to see Ali.

I followed Dr. Saleh to the burn unit, where some men helped us on with green smocks, face masks, gauzy hair nets, and shoe coverings. Then we walked down a bare and quiet hall that reminded me of a prison corridor. The only thing on the walls was a framed portrait of Saddam Hussein. Dr. Saleh opened a door and we went into a small room where an older woman in a black abaya, Ali’s aunt, was sitting in a chair. A tiny window in the far wall of the room let in some sunlight. The aunt was sitting next to a bed on wheels that had a hooplike structure over it. Dr. Saleh carefully pulled back a coarse gray blanket, and I saw Ali’s naked chest, his bandaged stumps, and his face. His large eyes were hazel, flecked with green. He had long eyelashes and wavy brown hair. I didn’t know what to say.

Dr. Saleh asked Ali how he felt. “O.K.,” he said. Wasn’t he in a lot of pain, I said to Dr. Saleh, in a whisper. I spoke in English. “No,” he replied. “Deeply burned patients don’t feel much pain because of the damage to their nerves.” I stared at Ali, who looked back at me and at Dr. Saleh. His aunt got up and stood behind the head of the bed. She said nothing.

I asked Dr. Saleh to ask Ali what he was thinking about. Ali spoke for a moment in Arabic, in a boy’s soft, high-pitched voice. “He doesn’t think of anything, and he doesn’t remember anything,” Dr. Saleh said. He explained that Ali did not know that his family was dead. I asked Ali about school. He was in the sixth grade, he said, and his favorite subject was geography. As he spoke, his aunt stroked his hair. Did he like sports? Yes, he replied, especially volleyball, and also soccer. Was there anything he wanted, or needed? No, nothing. He looked at me and said something that Saleh didn’t translate until I insisted: “He says that Bush is a criminal and he is fighting for oil.” Ali had said this as he had said everything else, without expression. Ali’s aunt began to sob quietly behind him. I asked Ali what he wanted to be when he grew up. “An officer,” he said, and his aunt cried out, “Inshallah”—“If God wills it.”

Dr. Saleh had begun to weep, and I could hear him catching his breath. He tried to compose himself, and we said goodbye to Ali. Neither of us spoke as we walked down the hall to the sterile room, where the orderlies took off our smocks and masks. Dr. Saleh rubbed his eyes and cleared his throat several times. We went back to his office, and he washed his face in a sink. “So it’s untrue what they say about doctors being able to suspend their emotions,” I said.

He looked at me. His eyes were pink. “We are human beings,” he replied. He explained that Ali knew that he had lost his arms, but that he had not acknowledged it yet: “He is conscious. He can see the stumps.” Ali would likely die within three weeks.

Dr. Saleh said that the hospital had taken in about three hundred people who had been injured by the bombing. The doctors had managed to save everyone so far, although twenty people were already dead when they arrived. “War always brings tragedy, fear, pain, and psychological trauma,” he said. “Personally, I feel that problems can be solved by discussion and negotiation and collaboration. When you use military power, it means your brain has stopped. As an Iraqi, I feel that this is my country, and that I should work to maintain it and protect it from invasion, whatever invasion it is. I think any person would take this position when his country is attacked.”

Dr. Saleh has three sons and a daughter. The oldest child is twelve, the same age as Ali. Dr. Saleh works long hours at the hospital, and ever since the city’s telephone exchanges were bombed he hasn’t been able to call home to see how his family is doing. He was worried.

The fourteenth day of the war in Baghdad, April 2nd, was pretty and springlike. I went with several journalists on a bus tour to the town of Al Hillah, about sixty miles south of the city, near the ruins of ancient Babylon. We had heard reports that American and British troops had crossed the Euphrates River southeast of Karbala and were advancing in a thirty-mile-long armored column, but apart from knots of Iraqi soldiers and sandbagged bivouacs on the side of the road—and occasional glimpses of camouflaged tanks and gun emplacements hidden in the sparse copses of eucalyptus trees—there were no signs of war. We could see Saddam’s great limestone palace overlooking Babylon, several miles away. Shops were open in Al Hillah and there were few soldiers on the streets. It resembled Baghdad two weeks earlier, before the bombing began.

We were taken to a hospital where there were scores of wounded people. Patients and doctors told us that a village had been bombed two days earlier and that, in a separate incident, the passengers of a bus had been ripped apart in some kind of an explosion. A man who had lost a leg lay next to a man who had had an arm amputated. The man whose arm was gone was being looked after by his wife. Their tiny baby, perhaps a month old, lay on the bed next to its father, swaddled in a cloth with a ribbon around it. The baby was sleeping. Its mother pointed to bandages on its head and told me that it had been hit by shrapnel, too. The man with the missing leg complained, rather mildly, about the attack: “If Americans want to come here as tourists, like they used to, we welcome them. But they shouldn’t do this.” He dismissed inquiries about his missing limb with bravado. “I am an Iraqi,” he said. “We are used to such things.”

On the drive back to Baghdad, we saw the vapor trail of an American plane. We watched it guardedly until it became obvious that the plane was heading away from, not toward, us. I nodded off until we got to the city. In our absence, the Baghdad International Trade Fair had been bombed, and a Red Crescent maternity hospital across the road from it had also been hit. An Iraqi man I know, Muhammad, had been driving along the street with his wife at the time of the bombing, he told us, and he had seen the windows of cars blown out and a bus being crushed like a pack of cigarettes. He left the engine of his car running and he and his wife ran for cover. Incredibly, he said, his car was still intact.

Sabah drove us over to see what had happened. A large section of the Trade Fair—where there are permanent pavilions that belong to such countries as Turkey and Syria—had been obliterated, and nearby buildings, including the Red Crescent hospital, were badly damaged. A group of wild-looking Iraqi fighters were manning heavy machine guns mounted on swivels on the beds of pickup trucks, and we decided it was probably not wise to hang around. Sabah drove very fast—too fast—to get us back to the hotel. For three blocks along the road that cuts past the perimeter walls of the Republican Palace complex all the shop fronts were torn up. Glass and pieces of metal lay tangled on the sidewalks. Some of the shops looked as if they had been looted.

The next day was warm and pleasant, except for the smoke. Birds sang and twittered all over town. Even the jihadis—the bearded, tough-looking Muslim volunteer fighters who had begun hanging around in recent days—seemed fairly relaxed. I walked past one of them, an Uzbek, perhaps, on the steps of the Sheraton as I came into the hotel. He had a broad face, slanted eyes, and a wispy beard, and his turban was tied so that the cloth hung down like chain mail around his shoulders. He was dressed in a calf-length robe, a military-style webbed belt at the waist. The silver hilt of a long, curved dagger protruded from the belt. It was as if one of Genghis Khan’s soldiers had been transported through time and deposited here.

By late afternoon, the skyline was almost totally obscured by smoke. Minarets, domes, and Saddam’s samovar-shaped trophy buildings were barely visible through the haze, which turned from brown and black to blue and gray as daylight faded. The bridges that span the Tigris downtown began to vanish in the fog, and the river turned a brilliant gold color. The Thames must have looked like this in Victorian times, shrouded in mist and the smoke from a million coal fires. From somewhere not far away came a steady thump-thumping sound, the noise made by artillery. The barrages got louder, and suddenly all the lights in the hotel went out. Our side of the river was completely dark. Then the whole city became black, except for the odd headlight and the flames from oil fires.

What we were hearing was the battle for the Baghdad airport. The next morning, I drove over to Yarmuk Hospital, just south of the city center, where many of the wounded had been taken. The wards were full of young men with short-cropped hair in bloody hospital smocks. One of them said that he was a member of the Special Forces of the Republican Guard and had been shot in the lung. His name was Omar Bahaldin, and he was twenty-three. Fluid was being drained from his lung into a plastic jug on the floor. His knees were raised, and he jiggled them back and forth. I thought this was because he was in pain, but he was trying not to show it. “We are not afraid,” he said. “I am injured at this moment, but when I get better I will fight and fight, again and again, until I am a martyr.” A man on an adjacent cot was writhing and groaning in semi-delirium. His brother was squatting on the floor next to him, holding his shoulders. An older man, his uncle, held on to his feet with both hands. “You are a lion,” he said to the wounded man. “We are proud of you.”

Early in the evening, Muhammad Said Al Sahaf showed up for a press briefing at the Palestine Hotel. He assured us that the Americans had become “bogged down,” and made a somewhat confusing reference to the movie “Wag the Dog.” He seemed to feel that the movie helped explain why the Americans had attacked the airport. “To airdrop these men is a showy operation, an exhibitionist attempt to show the world that their shock and horror is succeeding,” he said. “But they have thrown their desert animals to be killed.”

The electricity had been off all over Baghdad for twenty-four hours, but, oddly, some lights came back on that night in the Republican Palace complex and in several other neighborhoods on the west side of the river. We could hear the rumble of artillery from the outskirts of the city again. What sounded like a firefight, with machine guns and mortars, broke out inside the palace grounds. A bomb was dropped on the compound, and the weapons fire continued for a bit, then died out. It felt as though almost anything could happen in Baghdad that night. ♦

Jon Lee Anderson, a staﬀ writer, began contributing to the magazine in 1998. He is the author of several books, including “The Fall of Baghdad.”